Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

Ocular disease in patients with ANCA-positive vasculitis

Anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-positive vasculitis—the term recently applied to Wegener's granulomatosis—is a rare multi-system inflammation characterized by necrotizing granulomas and vasculitis. We investigated the ocular manifestations of this disease in a group of patients drawn from five inflammatory eye disease clinics across the United States. Of 8,562 persons with ocular inflammation, 59 individuals were diagnosed with ANCA-positive vasculitis; 35 males and 21 females, aged 16 to 96 years, were included in this study. Ocular diagnoses were scleritis (75.0%), uveitis (17.9%), and other ocular inflammatory conditions (33.9%) including peripheral ulcerative keratitis and orbital pseudotumor. Mean duration of ocular disease was 4.6 years. Oral corticosteroids and other systemic immunosuppressive agents were used by 85.7% and 78.5% of patients, respectively. Over time, patients with ANCA-positive vasculitis experienced 2.75-fold higher mortality than other patients with inflammatory eye disease

Social exclusion modulates priorities of attention allocation in cognitive control

Many studies have investigated how exclusion affects cognitive control and have reported inconsistent results. However, these studies usually treated cognitive control as a unitary concept, whereas it actually involved two main sub-processes: conflict detection and response implementation. Furthermore, existing studies have focused primarily on exclusion’s effects on conscious cognitive control, while recent studies have shown the existence of unconscious cognitive control. Therefore, the present study investigated whether and how exclusion affects the sub-processes underlying conscious and unconscious cognitive control differently. The Cyberball game was used to manipulate social exclusion and participants subsequently performed a masked Go/No-Go task during which event-related potentials were measured. For conscious cognitive control, excluded participants showed a larger N2 but smaller P3 effects than included participants, suggesting that excluded people invest more attention in conscious conflict detection, but less in conscious inhibition of impulsive responses. However, for unconscious cognitive control, excluded participants showed a smaller N2 but larger P3 effects than included participants, suggesting that excluded people invest less attention in unconscious conflict detection, but more in unconscious inhibition of impulsive responses. Together, these results suggest that exclusion causes people to rebalance attention allocation priorities for cognitive control according to a more flexible and adaptive strategy